Peter Frampton knew he wanted to be a musician very early on in life. At the young age of 7, discovered his grandmother’s banjolele in the attic, and taught himself to play it. Not satisfied with just that, he also taught himself to play guitar, piano, and organ as well. By the time he was 8, he was enrolled in classical music lessons to immerse himself further in his chosen passion.
Frampton played in his first band, The Little Ravens, at age 12, and was classmates with David Jones A.K.A. David Bowie. Frampton’s band played on the same bill at school as Bowie’s band, George and the Dragons, and Peter and David would spend lunch breaks together, playing Buddy Holly songs, despite the 3 year difference in age.
By 14, he was also a successful child singer, in a band called the TruBeats, then in another called The Preachers, both produced and managed by Bill Wyman of Rolling Stones fame. In 1969, when Frampton was 18 years old, he joined with Steve Marriott of Small Faces to form Humble Pie. While playing with Humble Pie, he did session work with several other artists, including Harry Nilsson, and during that period, was introduced to the “talk box,” which later became one of his trademarks.
In 1972, Frampton went solo, but he had little commercial success with his early albums, despite guest appearances from other artists like Ringo Starr and Billy Preston. Everything changed forever in 1976 with Frampton’s best-selling live album,Frampton Comes Alive!, from which Baby, I Love Your Way, Show Me the Way, and an edited version of Do You Feel Like We Do, were all hit singles. The album even beat Fleetwood Mac’s Fleetwood Mac to become the top selling album of 1976. A tribute to the album’s staying power, readers of Rolling Stone ranked Frampton Comes Alive! No. 3 in a 2012 poll of all-time favorite live albums.
After his massive success, Frampton made a few decisions that would adversely affect his career, one of them being to appear shirtless on the cover of “Rolling Stone.” Instead of being considered a serious rocker, he was then viewed as a pop idol, and later said “he regretted the photo because it changed his image from a credible artist to a teen idol.”
His next album failed to achieve the lofty heights of popularity that the live album had, in spite of having a hit song with I’m In You. Then he made the decision that would radically alter his career, starring, with the Bee Gees, in producer Robert Stigwood’s film, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1978.
Suddenly, Frampton’s career seemed to be falling as quickly as it had risen. He also played guitar on the title song of the 1978 film, Grease, a song newly-written for the film by Barry Gibb.
Then, in 1978, Frampton suffered a near-fatal car accident in the Bahamas that marked the end of his prolific period, and the beginning of a long fallow time where he was less successful than he previously had been. Although his albums generally met with little commercial success, he continued to record throughout the 1980s. By the end of the decade, he also reunited with old friend David Bowie, and they worked together to make albums. Frampton played on Bowie’s 1987 album Never Let Me Down and sang and played on the accompanying Glass Spider Tour.
Restless after successfully touring with Bowie, Frampton kept referencing Steve Marriott, and at the beginning of 1991 rejoined his old Humble Pie mate for a number of shows (Marriott’s final United Kingdom gigs) at the Half Moon in Putney, London. The chemistry was still there for a while, as both Frampton and Marriott laid down some tracks in L.A. and prepared to do a “Frampton-Marriott” tour. However, Marriott returned to England in April and he died in a house fire less than 24 hours after his return. Broken up by Marriott’s death, Frampton went off the road for a time.
Despite releasing several albums from 2007 through 2018, Frampton never again quite found the recording magic created by the release of Frampton Comes Alive! He continued to release new material and tour until everything changed in 2019.
In February 2019, Frampton announced he will be retiring from touring with his ‘Peter Frampton Finale—The Farewell Tour’ commencing in June in Tulsa, Oklahoma, through October, ending in Concord, California. He sadly revealed the reason for the farewell tour; he’d received a diagnosis that he has inclusion body myositis (IBM), a progressive muscle disorder characterized by muscle inflammation, weakness, and atrophy (wasting). He was scheduled to also do a brief tour of the UK, but that was shelved due to Covid-19. Frampton currently resides in Nashville.
Tami Danielson is the main in-house blogger and Director of Operations for Pop-Daze. She was raised in California and Florida and currently resides in Oregon. Tami has written for a variety of periodicals and has provided digital marketing services for a number of artists. She can be reached at [email protected]
